The perception that only elite schools produce elite leaders needs to die.

The No. 1 company in last years Fortune 500 was Walmart Inc., with $500 billion in revenue. That would make its chief executive, Douglas McMillon, a pretty important and powerful executive, dont you think? Can you guess where he went to college? The University of Arkansas. He has an MBA, too. From the University of Tulsa.

Second on the list was Exxon Mobil Corp. Its CEO, Darren Woods, went to Texas A&M. Third was Berkshire Hathaway Inc., run by the man many consider the greatest investor who ever lived: Warren Buffett. He spent three years at the Wharton School before transferring to the University of Nebraska, from which he graduated. He was then rejected by Harvard Business School. (He got his MBA from Columbia Business School, where he famously learned from the great value investor Ben Graham.)

Fourth was Apple Inc., whose chief executive, Tim Cook, is arguably the most important executive in all of tech. He went to a university better known for football than academics: Auburn.

Are you sensing a pattern here? General Electric Co.s Lawrence Culp went to Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. Cardinal Health Inc.s Michael Kaufmann went to Ohio Northern University in Ada, Ohio. AT&T Inc.s Randall Stephenson went to the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond, Oklahoma. General Motors Co.s Mary Barra went to Kettering University in Flint, Michigan. (Kettering used to be the General Motors Institute before it was spun off from GM in the early 1980s.)

Go to a State school and save your money. That you won't work half of your life paying off your school loans. Also, there's nothing wrong with going to a trade school. You can make a lot of money learning a trade instead of getting some useless Liberals Arts degree.

The dirty little secret is that the Ivy’s have mostly developed into a place for making connections into government, or into the grifter structure that lobbies government, or uses any of a 1000 ways to tap into government largesse.

Their educational product is becoming obviously inferior with a few specific programs. (Harvard Law not being one of them)

That’s a key question. How many of the top CEOs, business executives, etc. went to prestigious universities, vs. how many went to state universities, or less prestigious private ones.

Someone on another thread mentioned that the reason to go to the prestigious universities, is to make connections, life long friendships with prominent people, etc. which benefit you throughout life. These universities do not give you a better quality education that you can get elsewhere. It’s all about the connections made.

Someone else noted, that every single member of the Supreme Court went to either Harvard or Yale.

The article lays out a case that the opposite is true. Lay out your case please.

Don't know what oldbrowser's case is or how he would reply, but I assert that this article makes only the case that, if you want to really break your ass and become "top dog," an Ivy League degree is not necessary.

However, this says nothing about the vast swathes of middle echelon drones who want to ensconce themselves in a cushy sinecure with a minimum of effort, based largely upon name-recognition rather than performance.

Gary C. Kelly is CEO of Southwest Airlines. He was born in San Antonio on March 12, 1955. Kelly received a Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Certified Public Accountant.

Doug Parker is CEO of American Airlines. He grew up in Michigan and received a BA in Economics from Albion College (1984). He then received an MBA from the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University (1986), where American Airlines offered him a job after a campus interview.

In the first place, most of these CEOs attained CEO status in a pre-internet era and a pre-fourth-grade-playground-dirtbomb-throw and a pre-facebook-picture beer-chugging and joint-smoking era. And they probably didn’t start out as CEOs, they probably graduated from a wide range of schools and entered their corporate careers as mid-level bureaucrats where it didn’t much matter if you graduated from the U of KS or the U of MS or Yale or some state school. That they are CEOs today is more a matter of having worked in their industries for 25 years than having graduated from Wharton.

That said, my nephew graduated from Wharton and was early recruited by Bain Capital (yes, Bain) and is making astrofrickinominal money.

Now it’s 25-30-35 years later and with the deep and nuanced insight and understanding only attainable by writers with the attention span of flying insects, all of a sudden we can pick a CEO and look at where they graduated college and come to this stunning conclusion that ignores the intervening 25 years and apparently it doesn’t matter where you graduated from or if they had a good football team.

Not excusing them one bit; The parents who paid these huge bribes were conditioned to believe that they were advancing the prospects of their kids and to do so, they believed they had to get their screw-off kids into name brand schools. Some of them might have quite legitimately paid $2K to SAT consultants, others might have paid $50K and $100K to a “casting agency” where it was plainly obvious that a stand-in test taker was going to sit for an important test. Others might have paid six figure amounts to get their kids to ghost on sports teams. Those latter items are frauds and knowing frauds.

What these sad episodes have to do with what hiring prospects may have been 25 and 30 years ago is.....nothing.

Attending an Ivy league school is more about the networking than the education. I’m not saying they don’t do a great job with education, but where the real benefits lie are the relationships students form with other students who will be the future CEOs and government leaders. It certainly doesn’t hurt your own prospects when you’re on a first name basis with classmates who are CEOs of fortune 500 companies and Supreme Court Justices.

“Most of the CEOs of USA went to Harvard or other Ivy league schools.”

Where did you get that info. I think you will find most CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies outside of finance did not go to Ivy League schools.You won’t find many Ivy Leaguers in public corporations outside of finance. Definitely not in tech because Ivy Leagues are not known for tech or engineering.

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